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Bill Clinton Recalls the Old Times Square

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThe ex-president retains his ability to tell a captivating story.

Leave it to Bill Clinton to steal the show — and somehow weave a tale of a steak and a prostitute into a news conference.

On Wednesday morning at Gracie Mansion, Mr. Clinton and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that their respective climate groups, the Clinton Climate Initiative and C40, would merge.

Mr. Clinton, always a good sport, hung around for a bit of local news as well: the results of a survey in Times Square that found that the car-diverting pedestrian mall has significantly reduced the concentration of nitrogen oxide and dioxide in the air.

Joshua Robin, a reporter at NY1, asked Mr. Clinton if he could recall any personal experiences in the old, pre-Disneyfied, pre-car-marginalizing Times Square of yesteryear.

As it turned out, the former president could — rather vividly:

When I was 18 years old in November of 1964, a freshman at Georgetown, I first went to Times Square. I bought a steak at Tad’s Steakhouse. I heard a guy ream his mother out, poor working woman, because she’d given him a hi-fi instead of a stereo speaker. I remember everything about it. I saw a hooker approach a man in a gray flannel suit. Pretty heavy stuff for a guy from Arkansas. My view is it’s way better now. You have to look at the overall numbers. Yes, look, I still have vivid memories of it. Romantic, fascinating.

It was dangerous from the point of crime and it was unhealthy from the point of public health. Furthermore, there are more people walking in Times Square today because you don’t have the traffic. The only thing is you have to account for a marginal increase in however inconvenient it is for people in a car … I think you did the right thing and I think there is no question that New York is better and the tourists are better off. And I love it.

Mr. Clinton concluded by recalling that when he was a college student, he was agile — and reckless — enough to dodge the cars zipping through Times Square.

Today, thanks to the pedestrian mall, he said, there is no need. “Now you can be my age and walk in Times Square and not get run down. That is pretty cool, too.”

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